American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945 by Garvin Jones and Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem by Robert M. Dowling

Abstract

American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945 Garvin Jones. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Slumming in New York: From Waterfront to Mythic Harlem Robert M. Dowling. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. These two provocative new literary studies rephrase Jacob Riis's apt if condescending question: How does Other Half live? Gavin Jones and Robert Dowling ask: Does Other Half merit a literary canon? Jones rereads literature of through three periods: antebellum economic downturns, late nineteenth-century discovery poor, and sociological Depression years. He employs a transhistorical approach and multilayered readings of texts from Melville's Redburn (1848) to James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). As a lucid theorist of natural relation of language to material (143), Jones is able to find linguistic energy in Melvillian beggars who point to signs in street and in maternal rhymes that soothe hungry children (in Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son). Jones further contends, ingeniously, that negative linkage of factory girls with a lack of words, as in Dorothy Richardson's 1905 semi-autobiographical The Long Day, denied their language of silence. Such a swath of classics and resurrected texts enables author to range far and wide in ethics of impoverishment narrative. As he phrases it, cultural possibilities [co-exist with] dilemmas of contact with destitute (61). One fascinating part of book analyzes the beauty and erotics of poverty (124) in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Jones focuses on James Agee's beautification of sharecropping poor white. Both Agee and Walker Evans have been much praised for prose and photographic descriptions of hovels elevated by striking handmade rocking chairs or of heroic family groups with malnourished faces. To Jones there is also beauty generated by such sights, and he concurs with scholar Peter Hitchcock, that aesthetics is a viable category in readings of working-class culture (125). Yet American Hungers daringly finds that Agee will not permit subjects themselves to be aware of beauty adhering in complete simplicity and scarcity. Nor can he exculpate Agee for a passionate response to slimly clad, appealing young farm women whose many children cluster around them. The celebrated author, Jones claims, consumes such defenseless women; and he even has a sadistic response to pain of others (126) when describing scarred and crippled. This is heady material, particularly in a sober assessment of narrative as an expansive literary form. Nevertheless, American Hungers quite effectively complicates writing poverty. Inevitably, of course, Jones finds trope of ambivalence widespread in Thoreau's 1854 classic, Walden (33). Less predictable is his take on Dreiser's Sister Carrie. …